Back in 2004, while the Empty Space Theatre was still among the living and regularly bringing Seattle startling new work, it produced a puppet show called Frankenocchio that launched a dozen careers. Or at least boosted some existing careers. Run your eye down the list of the original personnel, and you'll see now-familiar names: playwright Stephanie Timm, director Scot Augustson, music by the Circus Contraption band, and puppets by Brian Kooser.

All those folks have gone on to greater glory, and Frankenocchio is remembered as one of the great theatrical moments of Seattle's bronze age. I'm sorry to report that I missed the original and can't compare it to this new incarnation, still written by Timm and still puppetted by Kooser, and given new life by director Rob Witmer (of the performance-art band "Awesome") and a band led by Shmootzi the Clod (with fellow members of the now-defunct Circus Contraption).

In honor of the past production, allow this plot synopsis by Joe Adcock, of the dearly departed Seattle Post-­Intelligencer, to serve:

God cuts Frankenocchio's strings. Frankenocchio falls to earth. A hard landing separates his head from his body.
Somehow, both body sections join a circus. The body greatly enhances the resident freak show. It also gives sexual fulfillment to the circus owner. And the head is attached to all sorts of beings that somehow get decapitated. Before two hours are over, violent deaths, arson, assaults, freaky sex and geriatric jokes have come and gone.

(God bless your brevity, Mr. Adcock, wherever you are.)

Among all this puppet mayhem, Timm and Kooser have inserted several tender and horrifying jokes: A shadow-puppet trapeze artist falls to her death, crushing her audience below, and a clown angel pulls her ghost (a slightly lighter silhouette than her body, a gorgeous effect) up to heaven. The circus owner, a hoochie-coochie girl, blows smoke rings from her hoochie-coochie. A clown gets his huge schnoz stuck up an elephant's asshole. And a hermaphrodite breaks the heart of a softhearted old circus geek (in the classic, bites-the-heads-off-chickens sense of the word), who moans: "Oooh! That bitch-slash-bastard!"

Kooser's puppets are expressively and artfully rough-hewn, like wood sculptures carved by the world's tiniest chainsaw, and evoke the cirque noir mood that, in 2004, was in the midst of its cultural invasion, turning Circus Contraption into a cult and bringing us boatloads of neovaudeville and burlesque. Some of the puppeteer and voice actors—particularly Kooser regular Gavin Cummins—give the spectrum of puppets bright, distinct characterizations.

But this edition of Frankenocchio, while a fun and raunchy diversion, doesn't live up to the earth-shattering, career-making inventiveness that secured the original's place in history. Perhaps that's because, six years on, we've been soaked in cirque noir, which fails to hold us in the same thrall. Or perhaps it's because the original had some energy in the performance or precision in the puppetry that this iteration lacks. (It did have clarinets, if my ears and a YouTube clip of the original are correct. Hoochie-coochie girls, elephants' assholes, and heartbroken geeks pair well with clarinets.)

Still, Frankenocchio is fun. No more, no less.

The Irrealist Theater (TIT) is a new company formed by some friends and satellite members of Implied Violence, the scrappy and spectacular company of gutter-dandies who have achieved feats: They've built a towering set out of giant ice blocks, scored fistfights and near-drownings to live chamber orchestras, and won a Stranger Genius Award in 2008. Like Implied Violence, the central members of TIT graduated from Cornish College of the Arts, wear suit vests and ties, and have a fondness for punctuating scenes with stage blood, smashed pies, and other varieties of goo. Comparisons are unavoidable.

Amniotes, the title of their maiden production (subtitled: An Imaginary History of the End of the World from 1954–20XX), sounds like a combination of "amniotic" and "Orestes." And it might as well be, as the play's themes include war, a disturbed soldier, domestic strife, a wife's revenge, eggs, pregnancy, and a scourge of birds that plagues the characters like the Furies plagued Orestes. (According to Merriam-Webster's, an "amniote" is "any of a group of vertebrates that undergo embryonic or fetal development within an amnion and include the birds, reptiles, and mammals." That is, things that grow in eggs.)

A soldier in fatigues, stiff from a coating of dried white paint, comes home to a small town where his wife, a woman with a windup key protruding from her back, is making apple pies. They talk and fight in stylized, loopy language about the war, whether she can get pregnant, whether she is pregnant by another man, and why she's making so many pies. Meanwhile, a silent video of the blocking is projected, life-sized, onto them and the white set, either predicting or replaying the characters' actions with a 30-second margin. "It's like being psychic," one woman exclaimed during intermission. "You know that she's about to slap him or whatever."

The couple replays the scene three different times, with variations, and a scientist in a lab coat occasionally appears to give self-conscious exposition about time, reproduction, the history of irrealism (an idea from the 20th-century critic and philosopher Nelson Goodman), and what's happening onstage: "Behind me, you see an actress. Her name is Sharon Dummar and she is making pies." (Um, duh. If you're going to deploy self-consciousness, please use it to some purpose.) There is some soft-shoe, crocheting, and a theremin player on the edge of the stage making occasional squeaks and whale wails. The whole thing ends with soldiers, a collapsing roof, and the end of the world. Or something.

Playwright William Brattain says he spent five years writing and rewriting Amniotes, and it shows—the resulting script has been cooked too long in one person's brain. The play is turgid and academic, densely layered with symbols and circuitous dialogue that surely means something to Brattain, but almost nothing to us. Obscurity isn't always bad: Works by Implied Violence (sorry, but the comparison must be made) are dense and plotless in any traditional sense. But they teem with life and energy—it's exciting to share a room with them. Not so much with Amniotes.

Moments before seeing the show this weekend, I ran into TIT's managing director, Jared Mark Askew, in an alley behind the theater. He was buzzing with energy, on his way to tend to some last-minute business, and said TIT hopes to stage one spectacle per year. "We want the next one to be outdoors, and we want to get away from chairs and lighting—get away from this," he said, gesturing toward the back door of the theater. "But we thought we'd get out of the gate with a straight play." He made a face and scare quotes with his fingers: "A 'straight play.'"

For their second production, let's hope TIT abandons straight plays (or "straight plays") altogether—Amniotes is an embryonic production, one that has had a long gestation but still isn't fully formed. But I look forward to watching them grow. recommended